With or Without You: A Memoir

by Domenica Ruta

  After a boring couple of hours in the Salem Hospital ER, I was interviewed by a therapist whose nametag read “Leesah.” For forty-five minutes, this woman and I stared at each other in tense silence.

  “Has anyone ever touched you inappropriately?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever been hit?”

  “No.”

  “Are you afraid for your safety at home … ?”

  Leesah discharged me. I got one day off to watch game shows and soap operas at my dad’s house, then I went back to school and life as usual. Everyone knew that I had botched a suicide—my mother’s big mouth made sure of that—and I felt even more humiliated. Yet I was still acting my part as captain of the cheerleaders. I must have been a gloomy sight even before all this happened. With my thick black eyebrows and the dark circles under my eyes, there was no amount of ribbon or glitter that could make me appear very cheerful. Our primary purpose was to support the boys’ basketball team, which lost nearly every game that year, and sometimes compete against other girls in cheering competitions, where we always came in second to last.

  “We suck so much, sucking is, like, our only superlative,” I said to myself aloud in the locker room.

  Soon after the presidential coup d’état, I was kicked off the squad. The mother of my co-captain had orchestrated it. Her best friend’s daughter took my place. Around the same time, national news broke the story of a woman in Texas who tried to have someone killed so that her daughter could be captain of the cheerleading squad.

  “Fuck!” my mother said. “Nikki, that could have been you!”

  I spent a lot of time that year lying on the floor of my bedroom listening to Nirvana and the Cure. I produced a staggering number of poems. Most of them rhymed, though I was wont to write little prose pieces, like this one I found in my diary:

  I know that beneath the silence is the sound of blood. That means the quiet is a lie. There is another world, the inner world of our bodies, made of millions of microscopic martyrs who work endlessly to keep us alive even when we, the totality of their efforts, want so badly for it to stop, for it to end, for us to die.

  In order to maintain their social position, the circle of friends I’d acquired had to dump me. They had their eyes trained on higher stakes these days anyway—high-school boys with driver’s licenses. Through what I imagine to be a series of very ardent, clumsy hand jobs, one of them convinced their new car-driving friends to stalk and harass me at my house, prank-call me at all hours, and leave threatening messages on our answering machine.

  “They said things, Nikki, I don’t even want to tell you,” my mother said with a shudder.

  Though, a minute later, she did.

  “They said they were going to rape and kill you and leave your body for me to find! I was so nice to your friends.” My mother pouted. “I can’t believe they would turn on me like this.”

  Reports of young girls being raped and murdered were always on the evening news. In light of everything else that was going on, it didn’t seem impossible that I could be next. I didn’t feel safe living at my mother’s house anymore, where the trill of the telephone made my pulse race and the sound of tires on the gravel had me ducking away from the windows. Nonna had just survived her first heart attack. Under the pretense that my grandmother needed my help to recover, I moved into her apartment next door.

  WHEN MY MOTHER WAS a little girl, my grandmother tended bar at a place called the Tack Room. “I was raised in that barroom,” Kathi said of her childhood. It was an unfortunate necessity, because Nonna’s husband, Mike, had left her for another woman years before they legally divorced, and she couldn’t afford to choose between raising her children and earning an income. One of Nonna’s sisters had married a man who owned a stable of racehorses, and my grandmother took up side work running numbers for him. Rita wasn’t afraid to move a bag of dope when she needed the money, and she taught her most intelligent and enterprising daughter, Kathi, how to do the same. The critical difference between this mother-and-daughter pair was that my mother grew up to be a narcotic omnivore, while her mother remained staunchly sober. My grandmother refused to touch alcohol and never developed any personal interest in the drugs she occasionally sold; she was, ironically, disgusted by anyone who did. “No-good fuckin’ losers!” she said, referring to such people, which included almost all of her relatives by both blood and marriage.

  My grandmother was just as crazy as everyone else in our gene pool, but I had rightfully identified her as the most trustworthy person among us. Since I was old enough to balance on two feet, I would toddle to where she lived next door and she would look at me as no one else in our family did—as if I was really there.

  I had always loved to read, and as I got older my appetite for fiction grew in ways I didn’t know how to meet. By the time I turned eleven, I’d ripped through every Agatha Christie novel I could find in both the school and the town library. I knew there was something better out there, but I didn’t know what it was or how to find it, so I asked my mother to buy me nothing but books for my birthday. Kathi came home with a stack of Disney books with huge illustrations and one dull sentence per page.

  “Thanks, Mum.” I pretended to smile as I opened the books, inwardly ashamed for us both. When she was high, she often forgot how old I was, and shopping was one of those chores made more bearable by Percocet or cocaine.

  Later in the week, I walked over to my grandmother’s house for my birthday dinner. She’d decided my present that year would be a trip to the bookstore, where I could pick out whatever I wanted. I chose the complete works of William Shakespeare. I liked the heft of the volume, the black leather cover, and the gold paint on the edge of the pages. As my grandmother worked on dinner, I sat on her porch and read Romeo and Juliet, because it was the most famous and I thought it would be the easiest to understand.

  “They weren’t really in love!” I shouted to Nonna through the screen door. She was frying disks of breaded summer squash in olive oil, our favorite snack. “They didn’t even know each other! They’re just young kids and wicked overly emotional.”

  “Everyone always thinks it’s this big love story,” she yelled back.

  “It’s not! It’s much better than that!”

  I heard my grandmother laughing above the crackle of oil, felt a warm breeze swirl around me. The river looked like a wrinkled sheet of silk, blue and green and black and white. If we get to keep anything of this life after we die, that afternoon is what I would choose.

  Growing up, I could wander over to my grandmother’s house at any hour of the day or night, and she would always get up to cook something for me. We would sit together in her kitchen, listening to Billie Holiday on the AM radio station she loved, and stuff ourselves silly on loaves of warm bread. Nonna was a shrieking harpy to her own children, but she truly enjoyed the genetic remove of being a grandmother.

  “Don-ah look atta my granddaughter! Oh, please! Don-ah look! She eez homely and stunata!” she would wail in public, holding her hand over my face. It was a trick of advertising in reverse that she had learned from her own Sicilian grandmother, who believed that Gypsies were always lurking around the corner, scouting young blood to steal into their clan. Publicly denouncing your offspring as damaged goods sent a message to these Gypsies that they’d be better off kidnapping someone else’s child. If I’d had a tail, it would have wagged hysterically whenever Nonna hid my face and told strangers at the supermarket that I was an ugly simpleton. If someone wanted to steal me, I thought, I must be a person of real value. Better still, someone wanted to protect me from being stolen.

  WHEN MY MOTHER AND Michael got married, they slept in a water bed behind our living-room couch and used my bedroom closet for their clothes and other effects. The storage space of one closet wasn’t nearly sufficient to contain the hoard of their boxes and trash bags. These things piled up and blockaded the door to my bedroom so that it couldn’t be shut without causing an avalanche. It was clear to
everyone that our family of three needed more privacy and space, so Nonna offered to swap homes with Kathi and Michael. She moved into our little one-bedroom apartment and we took over her house at 35 Eden Glen Avenue. In the spring of 1993, my stepdad disassembled my twin bed and reassembled it in the space where the water bed once stood behind the living-room couch. Nonna was in my old bedroom, her TV blaring all day and night. The oblong teak mask that my grandfather had brought home from the Pacific after World War II hung on the wall across from my bed. I would fall asleep staring into its wooden eyes, the thick lips pressed into a bemused smile, and wonder what secrets the mask was keeping from us.

  My grandmother had recently retired from her job as a kitchen aide in a hospital cafeteria. She was in her golden years now, a time she spent screaming at her television and trying to re-clog her recently shunted arteries.

  “Nonna, that has a lot of cholesterol,” I would say as I watched her drop an entire stick of butter into a pot of angel hair.

  “Ba fangul,” she shouted back. She added olive oil, salt, and a pound of crispy bacon to the pot. “Maybe I want to die!”

  Nonna was very weak from her surgeries, and I enjoyed playing her nurse. I occupied myself with cleaning and other chores, keeping her to a schedule of medications, and taking her blood-sugar readings. After a triple-bypass surgery, Nonna couldn’t stand longer than a few minutes or raise her arms to wash herself. We put a plastic deck chair in the shower and I would stand outside the curtain with a cloth, gently soaping her back and shampooing her hair. At thirteen I was still afraid of the dark, but I didn’t flinch at the sight of my grandmother’s wiry gray pubic hair, the ribbon of scar tissue from the bypass that sliced her from heart to thigh, the pink satiny coil of skin left by the mastectomy she had before I was born. It was the image of my grandmother with wet hair that I found distressing. Nonna had those fabled Sicilian follicles—thick, coarse strands of hair, each one gleaming and tough as steel wool. Throughout my grandmother’s battle with breast cancer and the course of chemotherapy, she did not lose a single strand. All five of her children corroborate this story, which leads me to believe that it might actually be true. I had always known my grandmother as a woman with a thick pouf of hair, set and curled like the typical old lady’s and dyed a purplish red. Sitting in the shower with her head sopping, she looked small and meek in a way I had never imagined possible.

  As with my father, I don’t remember my grandmother ever saying that she loved me, but I never questioned that she did because of the names she called me—giugiunelle or putan, chickpea or whore. Terms of endearment, obviously, because she also used to call her cats these names. Nonna’s cats, Balthazar and Nicodemus, were the two biggest whores we knew. They used to disappear for days. “Out whoring!” Nonna would yell as though summoning them home. When the cats finally returned, she would cook them their own dinner of liver and tripe. One of them—Balthazar, I think—contracted a feline strain of the AIDS virus. This was in the eighties, at the height of the HIV epidemic, when misinformation was rampant and everyone was paranoid about catching it from a toilet seat. There were several heroin addicts in our extended network of friends and family who were HIV positive.

  “That’s what he gets for being such a whore!” Nonna chastised the cat.

  She would have said the same thing to any of her children had they come to her with such a diagnosis. But when her prodigal son returned mewling after a few nights on the prowl, Nonna’s eyes would tear and she would fry an egg just for him.

  At this point in her life my grandmother had long since given up wearing a prosthetic breast, let alone a bra. She didn’t wear her dentures, comb her hair, or shave her armpits. Lisa and Donald had told me that all the kids on Eden Glen Avenue thought my grandmother was a witch. It was a natural conclusion, given her toothless, one-titted rants at the neighbors and the way she muttered angrily to herself while walking up and down the street. Jehovah’s Witnesses once knocked on her door. Once. My mother and I were in the driveway next door, getting ready to go out, when we saw the two young men in crisp suits climbing the steps of her porch.

  “Hold on, Nik,” Mum said. “I want to watch this.”

  We saw them knock on her door and wait. A shriek and a curse later, they were running for their lives. Nothing could have made me prouder.

  Living with Nonna had many advantages, the biggest being food. She had that Depression-era talent for making a feast out of nothing. One night I watched her take rotten, almost liquefied peppers and tomatoes from the windowsill where she’d left them to ripen. She cut off the green, fuzzy mold and fried the remaining bits in olive oil with meat and potatoes and garlic.

  “That’s friggin’ gross, Nonna. I’m not eating it.”

  “Statta zite! You’ll eat it, you putan!” she hollered, and banished me from the kitchen. After dinner I was licking the pan she had cooked it all in.

  When I remember my grandmother now, I picture her sitting on her living-room couch, wearing a cheap cotton housedress, her one, lopsided boob drooping toward her hip, her wild, reddish hair sticking up in all directions, and the crooked smile on her face as she leans over to one side and waves her hands to divert a loud, rippling fart in my direction.

  “You know, Nikki, every time a person passes gas invisible particles of shit are flying through the air!”

  WHEN I HAD FINISHED with my homework and the horrible sitcoms I watched, Nonna would transplant herself to the living-room couch so that we could watch TV together until one of us fell asleep. We stayed up late into the night watching old movies that my grandmother called “pictures.” The spring I lived with her we watched The Pit and the Pendulum, the entire Shogun series, and Alex Haley’s Roots. Several other movies I sometimes think we dreamed. If imaginations can be inherited, mine certainly was, because Nonna and I had an identical subconscious. Those months when we lived together were full of magical projection. It was uncanny the way we were always finding bits of our darkest desires being enacted on the screen. There was one movie about a lake in rural North America infested with piranhas. As shoals of bloodthirsty fish shredded the limbs of teenagers from a nearby summer camp, I imagined the kids at St. Mary’s being devoured.

  “I’m rooting for the piranhas,” Nonna said, as though she could hear my thoughts.

  In another of our late-night B-movie horror shows, nuclear fallout causes the few surviving men and women to roam the scorched earth with painful, lumpy mutations growing out of their bodies. “We deserve a lot worse than that, after the way we’ve treated this planet,” Nonna said in disgust.

  Even nature programs revealed to us the brutal world as we recognized it: sharks leaving flesh wounds as part of the courtship ritual, procreation by gang rape, and, for the finale, intrauterine cannibalism! Shakespeare couldn’t have done a finer job.

  EVENTUALLY I MOVED BACK home with my mother. I became a teenager and discovered sex—truly my gateway drug. Nonna was watching TV next door as always, though I went to see her less and less. My life was full of boys. I no longer needed the company of a crazy old lady. But I still called often to check on her.

  “Hello, Nonna, it’s me. Just calling to make sure you haven’t died yet. Have you? Okay. Bye.” I was showing off for some guy, trying to prove how dark and fascinating I was.

  The truth was that my grandmother and I talked about death often. “It’s gonna happen! To me, to you. We’re gonna die.” Nonna loved to remind me when I was a trembling little kid afraid of my own shadow. She took me by the shoulders and gently shook me.

  “Listen to me,” she said. “Only a moron would be scared.”

  ——

  THE LAST TIME I saw my grandmother, I was an eighteen-year-old college freshman. My mother had turned her life around, financially at least, and for the first time we were confronted with the burden of surplus income. Kathi was of the mind that her money possessed the ability to fly out the window like a colony of bats leaving a cave at dusk, and she was determined to spe
nd what she had before that could happen. It would be allegory in neon, this reversal of fortune, a spectacular failure about to burn the horizon like a hot summer sunset. I had to act fast if I was going to take advantage of my mother’s temporary boom, so I charged a round-trip ticket to Amsterdam and a two-month Eurail pass on her American Express card. It would be my first time leaving the country, traveling without a “grown-up,” traveling somewhere farther than Disney World. There were many firsts ahead of me, and I was so excited and self-absorbed and adolescent that I hardly remembered anyone in the world existed besides me. I am ashamed to admit that my mother actually had to remind me to go next door and say goodbye.

  I knocked twice and walked in, as was my custom, and Nonna began shouting at me: “What are you doing here? I told your mother not to send you over! Get out of here!”

  I started to say goodbye, and Nonna burst into tears. “I didn’t want to see you,” she shrieked and took me into her arms. “Now get! I told you—go!”

  I hugged and kissed her and said goodbye. We both knew it would be the last time.

  I wrote to my grandmother from Italy, a place we’d always dreamed about visiting together, but by then it was too late. I took a train from Rome to Champéry, Switzerland, where I crashed at the apartment of a rich college friend. We drank bottles of scotch, smoked potent Dutch hash, and had stoned, pretentious conversations with other backpackers about Life and Art. One morning, while I was walking to the market to buy cigarettes and milk, I saw a bright red biplane doing tricks in the air: loop-the-loops and flips and turns. The plane looked like a toy in the wide blue sky, like a child playing, or the spirit of a child, or the spirit of an old body suddenly returned to youth. In an instant, I knew: my grandmother was dead and she had come to say goodbye to me.